The Roswell Slides and the BeWitness Event

The story begins in 1998. Cat Beason was clearing a house near Sedona, Arizona, when she found about 400 Kodachrome slides. They had belonged to Bernerd and Hilda Blair Ray of Midland, Texas. He was an oil exploration geologist. She was an oil attorney and pilot. Two of those slides would end up at the centre of this story.

In 2011, blogs by Nick Redfern and Anthony Bragalia leaked that the slides existed. Jaime Maussan first saw them in Chicago in November 2013. Producer Adam Dew controlled the images. On November 12, 2014, Tom Carey announced the "Smoking Gun Slides," presented as evidence for Roswell.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015. Cinco de Mayo. At about 7:40 PM the show began at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City. Tickets cost 1,300 pesos or 300 pesos. A livestream sold for $20, and viewers reported that it failed.

On the screen, a small body lay on a shelf behind glass. A placard stood at its feet. Maussan told the crowd: "Finally we have the evidence we've been waiting for all this time." Forensic medical examiner José de Jesús Zalce Benítez listed 43 anomalies, among them eyeballs that had not receded, "unlike mummies," and no visible pelvic bones. His conclusion: "morphology incompatible with human life." Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo astronaut, appeared in a recorded interview: "It looks like what I thought the Grays would look like." Carey said the experts had found the body was "not a mammal, not a primate and not human." The placard, he said, could not be read.

The Roswell Slides Research Group was an informal online team. Nab Lator built a blur kernel, and the team ran the placard through a commercial program called SmartDeblur. The first results took "less than 5 minutes." On May 8, Robert Sheaffer published the first reading: "MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY." A fuller reading ended: "Loaned by Mr. S. L. Palmer, San Francisco, California."

Ted Molczan put it plainly: "You folks solved in no more than 2-3 days what the promoters claimed not to have been able to solve in 3 years!"

A 1938 issue of Mesa Verde Notes described a mummy returned to the Park Museum by Mr. S.L. Palmer Jr. His father had taken it from the ruins in 1894. "The mummy is that of a two year old boy." A curator at Mesa Verde National Park wrote that the child had been taken off public display many years ago, out of respect for the child and the family.

Bragalia apologised "to the Native American people." Don Schmitt wrote: "I now realize that the image in the slides is a mummy as specified by the display placard." Maussan called the deblurring a hoax. Then he offered a US$5,000 bounty for another photo of the same mummy. Bragalia collected it and donated all of it to a Native American non-profit organization. Dr. Richard O'Connor, one of Maussan's own experts, changed his mind: "there's no way that's not the same being."

Most people, Schmitt and Bragalia among them, accept that the body is a mummified Ancestral Puebloan boy photographed in a museum case. Mesa Verde is the leading candidate. Montezuma Castle in Arizona is also named. The harder questions concern the promoters. They had held the slides for years and called the placard unreadable. Critics said the highest-resolution scans had been held back, questioned how independent the panel was, and objected to a child's remains being turned into a paid spectacle. Mexico's Diario Basta called BeWitness "an absolute fraud." Whether anyone knowingly deceived the public is still disputed.

In the Skeptical Inquirer, Sheaffer called the affair "UFOlogy's Biggest Black Eye." Kevin Randle followed the trail of the bounty. Bryce Zabel called it "a cautionary tale about how many of us want to believe so much we lose access to our critical faculties." The slides were supposed to prove Roswell. Instead they became a lesson in how belief can outrun evidence.